Having covered all the languages spoken in the southern parts of India,it is apt we try to study the genealogy of the primary dravidian languages spoken in India with the aid of this tree diagram.

The origins of the Dravidian languages, as well as their subsequent development and the period of their differentiation are unclear, partially due to the lack of comparative linguistic research into the Dravidian languages.

Proto-Dravidian is thought to have differentiated into Proto-North Dravidian, Proto-Central Dravidian, Proto South-Central Dravidian and Proto-South Dravidian around 500 BCE, although some linguists have argued that the degree of differentiation between the sub-families points to an earlier split.

The existence of the Dravidian language family was first suggested in 1816 by Alexander D. Campbell in his Grammar of the Teloogoo Language, in which he and Francis W. Ellis argued that Tamil and Telugu were descended from a common ancestor. However, it was not until 1856 that Robert Caldwell published his Comparative grammar of the Dravidian languages, which considerably expanded the Dravidian umbrella and established it as one of the major language groups of the world. Caldwell coined the term “Dravidian” from the Sanskrit drāvida, which was used in a 7th century text to refer to the Tamil language of the south of India. The publication of the Dravidian etymological dictionary by T. Burrow and M. B. Emeneau was a landmark event in Dravidian linguistics.